Slavoj Žižek - A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name

The self-perception of Europeans in toto is that they have too much to lose to risk a revolution (a radical upheaval), and that’s why the majority tend to vote for the parties that promise them peace and a calm life (against financial elites, against the “immigrant threat,” …). That’s also why one of the losers of the 2019 European elections was the populist Left, especially in France and Germany: the majority doesn’t want political mobilization. Rightist populists understood this message much better: what they really offer is not active democracy but a strong authoritarian power which would work for (what they present as) the people’s interests. Therein resides also the fatal limitation of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s DIEM (Democracy in Europe Movement): the core of its ideology is the hope of mobilizing the bulk of ordinary people, to give them a voice by way of breaking the hegemony of the ruling elites.

Some years ago, I heard an anecdote from a friend of Willy Brandt. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev – at this time already a private citizen – wanted to visit Brandt, and he appeared unannounced at the door of his house in Berlin, but Brandt (or his servant) ignored the ringing of the bell and refused even to open the door. Brandt later explained to his friend his reaction as being an expression of his rage at Gorbachev: by allowing the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev had ruined the foundations of Western social democracy. It was the constant comparison with the East European communist countries that maintained the pressure on the West to tolerate the social democratic welfare state, and once the communist threat disappeared, exploitation in the West became more open and ruthless and the welfare state also began to disintegrate.

Simplified as this idea is, there is a moment of truth in it: the final result of the fall of communist regimes is the fall (or, rather, the prolonged disintegration) of social democracy itself. The naive expectation that the fall of the bad “totalitarian” Left will open up space for the good “democratic” Left sadly proved wrong. A new division of the political space in Europe is gradually replacing the old opposition between a center-Left party and a center-Right party replacing each other in power: the opposition between a liberal-center party (pro-capitalist and culturally liberal: pro-choice and gay rights, etc.) and a populist Right movement. The paradox is that the new populists, while culturally conservative, often advocate and even enforce, when they are in power, measures that are usually associated with social democracy but which no actual social democratic party dares to impose.

Even the success of Green parties in the 2019 European elections fits this formula: it is not to be taken as the sign of an authentic ecological awakening; it was more an ersatz vote, the preferred vote of all those who clearly perceive the insufficiency of the hegemonic politics of the European establishment and reject the nationalist-populist reaction to it, but are not ready to vote for the social democratic or even more radical Left. It was a vote of those who want to keep their conscience clean without really acting. That is to say, what immediately strikes the eye in today’s European Green parties is the predominant tone of moderation: they largely remain embedded in the “politics as usual” approach; their aim is just capitalism with a green face. We are still far from the much-needed radicalization that can only emerge through the coalition of Greens and the hard-core Left.

But what is really at stake in today’s mess is not primarily the destiny of the social democratic parties as political agents, but the destiny of what Peter Sloterdijk called “objective” social democracy: the true triumph of social democracy occurred when its basic demands (free education and healthcare, etc.) became part of the program accepted by all main parties and inscribed into the functioning of the state institutions themselves. Today’s trend goes rather in the opposite direction: when Margaret Thatcher was asked what she considered to be her greatest success, she snapped back “New Labour,” hinting at the fact that even her Labour Party opponents had adopted her economic politics.

The remaining radical Leftists have a quick answer to this: social democracy is disappearing precisely because it adopted neoliberal economic politics, so the solution is … what? This is where the problems begin. Radical Leftists don’t have a feasible alternative program, and the disappearance of European social democracy is a more complex process. First, one should note its recent electoral successes in Finland, Slovakia, Denmark, and Spain. Second, one should note that, measured by European standards, American “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders are not extremists but modest social democrats. In previous decades, the standard radical Leftist stance toward social democracy was one of patronizing distrust: when social democracy is the only Leftist option, we should support it, knowing that it will ultimately fail – this failure will be an important learning experience for the people. Today, however, old-style social democracy is more and more perceived by the establishment as a threat: its traditional demands are no longer acceptable. This new situation demands a new strategy. The lesson for the Left from all this is: abandon the dream of a big popular mobilization and focus on changes in daily life. The real success of a “revolution” can only be measured the day after, when things return to normal. How is the change perceived in the daily lives of ordinary people?

Back in the UK, the Brexit mess is not an exception but just the aggravated explosion of a tension that runs across all of Europe. What the situation in the UK demonstrates is that, as Mao would have put it, secondary contradictions matter. Corbyn’s mistake was to act as if the choice of “Brexit or not” is of no great importance, so (although his heart was with Brexit) he opportunistically navigated between the two sides; trying not to lose votes from either side, he lost them from both. But secondary contradictions do matter: it was crucial to take a clear stance. This is, more generally, the tough question that the European Left is carefully avoiding: how, instead of succumbing to the nationalist populist temptation, to elaborate a new Leftist vision of Europe.

In his “Political Considerations About Lacan’s Later Work,” Jean-Claude Milner quotes Lacan’s “Joyce le symptôme”: “ Ne participent à l’histoire que les déportés: puisque l’homme a un corps, c’est par le corps qu’on l’a [The only ones to participate in history are the deported: since man has a body, it is by means of the body that others have him].” … “ Il [= Joyce] a raison, l’histoire n’étant rien de plus qu’une fuite dont ne se racontent que des exodes [Joyce is right, history being nothing more than a flight, about which only exodus is told].” Lacan refers here to the opposition between “flight” (wandering around without goal) and “exodus” (when we wander with a final destination in mind, like the Jews in search of a promised land): “flight” is the real of history, lawless wandering, and this flight becomes part of narrated history only when it changes into exodus. Milner then applies this opposition to today’s immigrants: they wander around and the place where they eventually land is not their chosen destination. This impossibility to organize their experience into the narrative of an exodus is what makes the immigrant refugees real and, as such, unbearable. Their bodies (often the only thing they possess) are an embarrassment, disturbing our peace – we perceive these bodies as a potential threat, as something that demands food and care, that pollutes our land. Hence,